Wilderness begins in the human mind.
The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore.
Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.
If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.
If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses -- they tie -- who cares? And why?
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of--a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?
I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.
Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.
Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.
This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.
The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.
Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.
Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.
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